Discussions

Recognizing that end-users struggling with overly-complex BI Tools is the number 1 reason why Business Intelligence projects fail to deliver the desired ROI, the Wabit was designed to conquer this primary issue. Although there are many BI Reporting tools on the market (both proprietary and Open Source), most of these tools are fairly difficult to use and require one or more days of training before a user can get started.
Committed to providing business users around the world with an intuitive BI Tool for everyday data analysis and decision making, SQL Power's Wabit designers set out to create the most intuitive and simplest BI Reporting tool on the market.
Like other SQL Power BI Tools, the Wabit Business Intelligence Reporting Tool is elegant and easy to use.
Wabit includes features such as a drag-&-drop playpen, live result-set updates, global searching, WYSIWYG report formatting... and no custom coding or Java scripting is ever required with the Wabit.
The Wabit also makes standard Reporting easier than ever. With a single mouse click, query results are instantly transformed into elegant reports - which can further be customized with fonts, colours, sections, breaks, headers/footers, logos and more.
The Wabit is an easy to use BI Reporting tool that doesn't require any SQL knowledge. It offers IT and business users alike the ability to:
* Drag-&-Drop source database tables into a playpen
* Use the Database Definitions to automatically formulate required joins
* Intuitively refine your queries with an "evolving" result set that refreshes instantly and continuously
* Search the result set for text strings to further expedite the database search
* Auto-Create SQL queries without any manual coding
* Generate, modify, format & customize Standard Reports at the touch of a button
* Customize the standard report into multiple sections, assigning a different Query to each section of the report
Download a free copy of the Wabit today from http://download.sqlpower.ca/wabit/current.html and use it to simplify all your database reporting needs. If you like the tool, all we ask is that you spread the word - tell your friends, colleagues and/or blog it

I've been looking for a BI tool that is easy for a business user with some DB knowledge to pick up.
This is a nice tool ... install is simple and the user interface is very intuitive.
However it seems a bit limited in functionality at the moment, e.g. the export options; I would have thought that an export to Excel would be included at the very minimum.
There also doesn't appear to be a user guide, not even a Help section.
IMHO, this is a promising tool - one to keep an eye on, but not yet ready for main stream use yet.

The product looks good - but you can't really tell from screenshots and marketing pay offs. I would suggest to release some documentation (a user guide, maybe) to help people evaluate it. I know it is open source and it is for free - thanks for that - and I could easily download and try it, but it takes time and good, useful docs can boost your quotation and make the difference.
Regards,
Raffaele

Hi, I'm one of the Wabit developers.
First, thanks for the comments! These are early days for the Wabit, and we'll take all the constructive criticism we can get.
First, about the lack of user docs: yes, there will be a user guide with a future version. We're holding off on this until we get more feedback from a wide range of users, because at this point we are willing and able to make some fairly fundamental changes to the user interface. Once we're reasonably satisfied the UI is converging on a more-or-less permanent form, we'll do a detailed writeup on all the features.
We also plan to include an embedded example project in a pre-filled HSQLDB, which will be linked to a walkthrough chapter in the user guide.
About the marketing-y wording in the post: sorry about that! The writeup our team posted to TSS was intended more for the business-and-managerial crowd. Our next release announcement will be more focused on the technical aspects TSS readers care about, such as:
* The UI is Swing, and works well on OS X, Windows, Linux, and other Swing-on-X11 platforms
* Requires JRE 5 or newer
* Connects to databases via JDBC
* Tested against PostgreSQL 8.x, MySQL 5.x, Oracle 10g, SQL Server 2000 and 2005, and HSQLDB. Should more-or-less work with other platforms, but YMMV.
* Project files get saved in a straightforward way to XML, which should work well when checked into a revision control system (so you can check reports into your projects, and extract the SQL queries from them programatically)
* The code is available under GPLv3
Finally, about exporting to Excel and other formats: what is the use case here? Is it to send the data to other people so they can play with it more (sort, filter, pivot, etc) or are you looking for just another paginated output type which would pretty much match the PDF when printed? Can both goals be met with the same .xls file?
As an aside, I should mention that you can right-click on any table of results and export it as CSV--which Excel can easily import. You don't get any formatting this way, of course.
Anyway, thanks again. I'd be happy to respond to more feedback!
-Jonathan Fuerth

Jonathan,
Thanks for mentioning the CSV export - I hadn't spotted that, and it may help.
With regard to your questions on Excel use cases, our business people use Excel the following:
1. To exchange data with external partners (the format is usually specified by the partner).
2. To merge data from various sources (including database and other excel feeds) into a report.
3. Some fancy presentation graphs, formatting etc.
I would have a hard time convincing our business users to use Wabit if it doesn't have Excel integration (even if there is an alternative), because excel is so ingrained in their thinking / practices.
Regards,
Greg

Thanks, Greg. I hear you. Excel is pervasive, and it can't be ignored as an output format.
We could probably incorporate an export to Excel that preserves column widths and fonts but not pagination. I think this would satisfy the needs you've outlined. I've put an enhancement request in our bug database for this.
Thanks again for your input. It's much appreciated.
-Jonathan Fuerth

Hi,
I tried this tool out and I guess once the guide is out it will be much easier to get started.
Loved the simplicity once I figured out how to use it. It's sill a work in progress so I look forward to:
1. Some formating options
2. Charts
3. Header and footer templates
Otherwise great start!
Mpume
http://mahalasoft.za.net

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